State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

The Geneva Negotiations

At the end of the 1970s, a new division appeared at GOSNIIOKhT with the intriguing name “the Sector for Foreign Technical Counterintelligence”. Ivan Sorochkin, who looked like a crook, was its first chief. He came to the institute from an establishment connected with the KGB, and his elusive slippery behavior was striking. The mystery of his mission became a little clearer when he appeared in our laboratory accompanied by an elderly man with a gloomy red-veined face and a skinny middle-aged brunette. They started rummaging through the wastebaskets looking for something, and when they found some scraps of paper, they put them into polyethylene bags and departed with satisfied faces.

I became acquainted with Ivan Sorochkin himself, as he was interested in my technique of analysis of micro-concentrations of chemical agents in different media. It turned out that he was a retired lieutenant colonel with a master’s degree in chemistry. His two other employees, who also appeared to be retired military people, spent their time at writing desks in a small room, and they were constantly busy writing something. Later I found out that they were writing reports about analytical work which they had never participated in. They were just copying excerpts from the completed works of others, creating the impression that these works were carried out by their orders and with their participation.

The sector of the institute dedicated to foreign technical counterintelligence (PD ITR) was far from modern. It wasn’t involved in developing technical methods for the determination of trace quantities of chemical agents. Sorochkin lived a parasitic life, imitating activity, in the typical Soviet way. As a specialist on the determination of micro-concentrations of chemical agents and their precursors, it pained me to see Sorochkin and his subordinates use my work to cover up their own idleness.

Back in 1984, I drew the attention of Kurochkin to the “specific character” of the activity of PD ITR, and he promised to talk with Grigory Patrushev, who was then the director of GOSNIIOKhT. I wanted my knowledge and experience to be used for creating an experimental basis for that service. However, our conversation achieved nothing, although real changes were still possible at that time.

The conceited Sorochkin had wormed his way into Patrushev’s confidence, and he virtually became his main advisor on many important issues. Working with the new Deputy Director in charge of the Security Regime, Sorochkin managed to get the director to hold back some departmental specialists. Soon Sorochkin became the head of one of the key subdivisions of the institute – the Scientific and Technical Department (NTO). However, when Sorochkin started plotting against First Deputy Director Guskov, he obviously didn’t properly calculate his own power.

According to an administrative provision on executive personnel, the position of the head of a department is competitive and should be approved by secret voting at the Science Council of the institute. Usually this procedure is a simple formality, because few people dared to vote against him when the director of the institute recommended someone for a position. However, there are always exceptions in life. In fact, everything worked in an atypical manner at that time. In the end Sorochkin became an ignominious failure and was not approved for the position. After that, he decided not to push his luck any further, and he quickly retired from the institute.

After that, Sergei Stroganov, an elderly retired colonel, was appointed the chief of the PD ITR Department. By that time this service had acquired the status of a department. Before that, Stroganov had worked at the Ministry of Chemical Industry. He brought three more people with him, who were also retired military men, who had worked in the technical subdivisions of the KGB. This event coincided with the replacement of Duka, the Director of the Security Regime Department, by Aleksander Martynov, a young KGB major, who had graduated from the Mendeleev Chemical and Technological Institute and had been assigned to GOSNIIOKhT. However, the future KGB officer didn’t stay long there. Te was sent to study at the KGB Academy, becoming a Chekist officially.

This was the situation at the institute when an idea occurred to me… to become head of the PD ITR Department, myself. I went with my idea to Nikolai Maslov, a friend of mine, who was head of the Planning and Economic Department at the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Mineral Fertilizers. For a long time, he had worked at different positions in the leadership of the Ministry of Chemical Industry, and at one point he had been the deputy chief of their Main Administration “Soyuzorgsynthesis”, which GOSNIIOKhT was a subsidiary of. That is why he knew the industry and the work of our institute reasonably well. I met Nikolai on holidays, along with some of our other colleagues, including Aleksander Ivanov. Later Ivanov started working in a section of the Chemistry Department at the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U., in charge of the military-chemical complex. When General Anatoly Kuntsevich was dismissed in 1994 in his capacity as the Chairman of Russia’s Committee for Problems of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions which answered to the president of Russia, Ivanov followed him a year later as the new chairman of that committee.

Nikolai Maslov liked my idea, and he immediately called Ivanov on a high-frequency communication channel. Ivanov quickly understood what we wanted and promised to talk it over with Victor Petrunin, Director of GOSNIIOKhT. This meant that the question was settled. A few days later, Petrunin called me and said that he had decided to appoint me to a very important position, as the head of the Foreign Technical Counterintelligence Department. He added that the formal agreement of the Ministry of Chemical Industry was required, and he hoped that it would succeed without any problems.

I felt that Guskov and Martynov, Deputy Director of the Department of the Security Regime, were not happy with the news about my appointment. Still KGB Major Martynov assured me that he would help out and give me the necessary support.

The next day, I was called to Ministry of Chemical Industry. It turned out that PD ITR answered to the Third Administration of the Ministry of Chemical Industry, in which Mikhael Milyutin, a KGB Lieutenant General, was the director. I was introduced to him by Ivan Tkachenko, head of the PD ITR Department, and a former commander of the division that served at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan.

The KGB general turned out to be a gray, slightly hunched elderly man with a slightly swarthy face imprinted with certain traces of intelligence. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and he seemed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of disappointment which was heightened by the backdrop of his huge gloomy office. There were models of ships, tanks, and some other armaments on one of the tables. These were gifts, and each model had an engraved silver plate.

The general asked me to sit down, and he sat opposite me, asking in a friendly way, “How are you feeling?” I said that I would be much better if I could find support for my plans for providing the department with the modern scientific equipment which I considered necessary for implementing the task at hand.

I briefly stated my understanding of our work, and the general answered that Tkachenko and Krasheninnikov would help me out. When we parted, General Milyutin asked me not to hesitate to contact him directly if I encountered any difficulties.

After this, I met Victor Krasheninnikov, a handsome young man with gray hair and a kind face, which contrasted with his responsibilities. He was the deputy head of the Third Administration, but he in turn answered to another deputy head of the same department, Elena Batova, a woman in her late 50s.

The amiable intelligent manner of Victor Ivanovich won people over, and it was difficult to imagine that he could hurt other people or let someone down. I liked him at once, and this impression lasted for a long time – I was never mistaken about Krasheninnikov. I think that he was a rare exception among the officials of such an odious department. To the end of my days on the job, I couldn’t imagine what his responsibilities were. Aside from monitoring the PD ITR at the ministry, he also arranged for the development of different industrial exhibitions. However, as far as I was concerned, his most important responsibility was connected with processing applications for imported equipment.

Scientific research institutes could buy new foreign scientific equipment, for the purpose of evaluating it. This was necessary so that recommendations could be made for its purchase on a large scale. A pretty woman collected these applications at the institutes, discussed them with Krasheninnikov, and decided whether or not they could be submitted for approval at the next meeting of the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) at the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

Krasheninnikov was shrewd enough to understand my major objective in my new position. I was primarily interested in scientific activity, and the PD ITR was my second priority. Still, he did everything he could to support my plans.

The Ministry of Chemical Industry, along with the employees from the PD ITR Department, elaborated the one-year plan as well as the long-term plans. These plans included the evaluation of the institutions involved in the development of the “Foliant” project, from the standpoint of their vulnerability to foreign technical intelligence. The next step was the development of a plan to fix the weaknesses in the system. In order to do this, it was necessary to provide the PD ITR Department with a technical basis, and I knew that it was useless to rely on other GOSNIIOKhT departments in that area. Krasheninnikov liked the logic behind my reasoning and he promised to help.

The branch research conference scheduled for November of 1986 fit my plans perfectly. I was very grateful to the predecessor of Stroganov for his efforts to organize this conference. A year later I personally felt very sorry for him when I was forced to suggest he leave his job. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing for him to do when we really started working at the PD ITR Department. The qualifications of the retired Colonel Stroganov, a veteran of the front lines who had served at Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site for a long time, were just not right for laboratory work. He even had trouble writing because his hands were always shaking.

The bulky “top secret” general instruction manual, approved by the Military Industrial Commission of the Central Committee of C.P.S.U., stipulated the objectives and tasks of the PD ITR, and the rights and responsibilities of its agencies. One of the most important tasks was the development of methods of permanent control over the activities of defense organizations and enterprises, in order to control the activities of foreign technical intelligence. This gave me the right to study all scientific and technical documents and plans of the scientific departments and laboratories.

All planned technical tasks for implementing scientific, technical, and design work were required to comply with a section of the specifications on PD ITR and had to be signed by the head of the PD ITR Department, among others. So there was a lot of paperwork, but I found a good way out of this. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Svyatoslav Sokolov, a senior scientific assistant, was also working in my department. After graduating from Moscow State University, he worked at the KGB Scientific Research Institute, and he was the head of the Physical Chemistry Laboratory there, so he understood scientific questions quite well. Svyatoslav Sergeevich was intelligent, had gentle manners and, therefore, he was the ideal person for communicating with the heads of research subdivisions at GOSNIIOKhT. Unfortunately, he was past his prime and, despite all his efforts, he couldn’t work at the laboratory of the department that I soon put into order. Work there required both manual labor and the skills of a specialist. Still, for a long time, Sokolov helped me out by attending numerous committee meetings in my place, as the head of the PD ITR Department, and by inspecting the documentation.

On the sixth floor of the GOSNIIOKhT’s modern new administrative building (the picture of this building was published in many articles devoted to my “case”), there was a room near my office that received all the bugged phone calls. All the telephone lines went through there, including the ones for internal use. With the help of the switchboard, it was possible to intercept telephone conversations so that people talking didn’t notice anything, and tape-recorders were installed there, too.

One of our employees sat at the control panel and monitored this dirty work. Before I was appointed head of the department, I heard in passing that there was such a service, but I really didn’t want to believe that it was true.

I decided to get rid of this unpleasant burden at any cost. The briefs I studied didn’t mention the use of such underhanded strategies of the PD ITR. I went to Ministry of Chemical Industry, to Krasheninnikov and Tkachenko, in order to get more precise explanations. They confirmed that tapping telephone conversations was outside our area of responsibility. It was done at the request of local KGB agencies. The head of the PD ITR Department at the Redkino subsidiary of the scientific industrial company (NPO) “Khimavtomatika”, who was present during our conversation, said that he had this service transferred from his department to someone in the First Department.

The responsibilities of PD ITR included the technical protection of the telephones from tapping by foreign intelligence services, but that was a very different matter and we took it very seriously and even helped the Main Department of Ministry of Chemical Industry with that.

We had to develop measures against taping conversations, meetings, and scientific conferences, as well as the meetings of the science councils and their sections. According to the recommendations of the department, the office doors of the heads of departments and laboratories were provided with acoustic protection. Additionally, a large part of our work was devoted to protecting GOSNIIOKhT’s computer center and the computers from electromagnetic radiation, which could be a source of information for foreign intelligence. It was possible to eliminate information leaks through an electric cable by installing a special transformer. However, it was very difficult to provide protection from external radiation. This work required considerable expense. The walls of GOSNIIOKhT’s two-story computer center (with a total area of several hundred square meters) were covered with a fine-steel net. There was another system of steel nets to protect the windows and doors. Together, these nets encased the building.

From time to time, the PD ITR Department checked the efficiency of this protection with special instruments. However, we didn’t have the necessary equipment to gauge the leakage of radiation on certain frequencies, so a special service of the PD ITR Department at “Khimavtomatika” at Redkino did this work. It was the only institution in the system of the Ministry of Chemical Industry that had the right to examine rooms with electronic computers.

Such serious protection was required after we found out that information could be read on foreign computers with the help of the specially implanted “bugs”, which were practically impossible to detect. According to the rumors, some specialists who were repairing a minor breakdown in the 1980s accidentally found a “bug” in a powerful computer that was made in Japan and installed at Gosplan (State Planning agency of the U.S.S.R.) This “bug” had been transferring information to foreign intelligence agencies for a few years, and according to a certain schedule, it “shot” the accumulated information to a spy satellite.

In principal, it was possible to spy without using a “bug”. It was enough just to record the electromagnetic computer radiation from a certain distance with the right equipment. That is why so much attention was paid to protection. Nobody wanted to be counted among the negligent workers.

For protection, we could use “jammers”, noise generators which were supposed to make it impossible to use electromagnetic radiation for obtaining computer information. Our industry manufactured such “jammers”, but the “noise” they created made the operation of foreign computers impossible. Primitive computers like the “Robotron” made in East Germany could tolerate the noise of a “jammer” and you could work on them with secret information in any specially equipped room.

By a twist of fate, after my arrest in 1992, I saw a “Robotron” computer on the desk of Victor Shkarin, a KGB investigator, when I was brought to his office. It had no “jammer” and I noticed that his office had no special protection. Moreover, from time to time, the investigator opened the window to air out the cigarette smoke from his cramped office. I teased him, saying that he was violating the PD ITR instructions for handling top-secret matters, but the captain was very serious. I got the impression he didn’t appreciate my sense of humor.

The question of protecting computers at GOSNIIOKhT was very important, because a number of imported instruments couldn’t go through the entire cycle of processing the information they received by themselves. This was the case, for example, at the Physical Chemistry Department, where they couldn’t use the computers with the NMR and chromatomass-spectrometer, devices for identifying chemical compounds made in the USA. This was beyond all common sense and I immediately settled this problem. There was a good excuse. The instructions stated that no special protection was required if secret information did not exceed 15% of the total volume of the processed information. But who could check the percentage of secret information, which was processed at facilities with, for example, chromatomass-spectrometers?

It wasn’t so easy to settle the question about tapping telephone conversations, because this work was done at the request of the Deputy Director of the Department for the Security Regime, and as I soon discovered, the job was performed with great enthusiasm. This is not surprising, since it allowed the operator to report every day to the KGB major himself, and to keep him well informed about the private lives of the institute employees!

I hurried to Martynov to discuss the fate of the concealed listening unit in the PD ITR Department. I gave him the reasons why this unit shouldn’t be my responsibility and asked the major to transfer it to the Department for the Security Regime, where the former blacksmith from the Analytical Department, Boris Churkov, could handle this work very well. I suggested that we provide technical support, making sure that the equipment was maintained at the necessary level and even purchase a more automated recording system, if necessary.

Martynov’s face turned red with anger and he said, “So, you start your work by making a mess of ours?!”

He had already become used to almost completely controlling the PD ITR Department, although formally it answered directly to First Deputy Director Guskov. However, before we had our conversation, I had learned that the operator of the concealed listening unit was also intercepting Guskov’s conversations. If necessary he could intercept the Director himself, except during his high frequency communications, of course. Several times I noticed Guskov sitting near his office and talking with people who had come to see him. So he understood that not only were the telephones being intercepted, but talks in his office were subject to eavesdropping as well. It was very easy for Martynov’s people, who were nominally members of my department, to install the “bugs”. They provided protection of information in the offices, and from time to time they checked the telephones and doors. This was funny and a little bit sad, because the people who were supposed to protect the bosses in these offices actually worked against them. Unfortunately, these were the KGB’s rules of the game. And I decided to go against the grain!

I explained to Martynov, who could hardly contain his rage, that additional work not stipulated by the provisions for organizing the PD ITR Department, might cost a lot in terms of energy and productivity, not just for me but also for him as Deputy Director in charge of the Department for the Security Regime. “Bugging” distracts us from our main work, which had increased sharply in its significance, on the threshold of finalizing the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Nobody at GOSNIIOKhT doubted that the negotiations for finalizing the CWC had nothing to do with the work of the military-chemical complex.

We had to hide our new developments at any cost. The KGB major certainly understood that my arguments were pure demagoguery. However, he couldn’t openly object to my logic, especially since I referred to the opinion of people from the Third Department of Ministry of Chemical Industry, of the USSR. As a result, Martynov promised to think it over.

The struggle for transferring the concealed listening unit succeeded only in 1988, when I handed over all the keys for the room and its equipment to Boris Churkov from the Department of the Security Regime, on receipt. However, these facts didn’t prevent the Director of GOSNIIOKhT, Victor Petrunin, from stressing in interviews to different correspondents that my responsibilities included tapping the telephones of the institute employees, as well as looking through their papers.

Concerning this “looking through the papers” business, I can firmly state that from my first days in my position as head of the PD ITR Department at GOSNIIOKhT and of the branch, I prohibited this occupation as useless and offensive to people’s dignity. In my opinion, the objectives of the department were different, and I did my best to run the department professionally.

There was also the matter of protecting the secrets involving the production of chemical agents. Part of the work of some Finnish specialists, which addressed the problems connected with technical control issues raised by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), appeared at GOSNIIOKhT. There was nothing there that could possibly surprise me, but the information contained in those reports allowed me to understand to some extent, the Western countries’ level of knowledge and experience in identification of chemical agents. And I believed this corresponded to their capabilities of technical intelligence.[62]^, [63]^, [64]^, [65]^, [66]^, [67]

At the same time, I couldn’t refuse Guskov’s next request to help the scientific commission conduct an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new radioactive device for detecting a gas attack on Soviet tanks. This device was proposed by scientists from the Military Academy of Chemical Defense, and it was designed and constructed by the Tula Special Design Bureau of Automation (OKBA). I spent a week in Tula testing this device, by “easy” military specialists. Several times OKBA created artificial concentrations of Substance 33 in a huge gas chamber. They injected the required volume of liquid agent into the flow of air directed into the gas chamber, and it was all thoroughly mixed by powerful fans. After that, two parallel streams of air from the chamber were sampled and directed through cells with a biological substrate (cholinesterase) and a radioactive device with an alpha-radiation source.

Whereas the cholinesterase analysis showed an almost constant concentration in the gas chamber model, the radioactive detector showed a decline of the concentration of Substance 33, and within ten minutes only very small concentrations were recorded. We repeated these tests several times, but the result was always the same.

I called the attention of the members of the commission to the fact that, increasing moisture in the air was the reason behind the tendency of the radioactive device’s signal to drop to almost a zero level. On the basis of this, I proposed the idea that the molecule of Substance 33 was undergoing a reaction of dietherification and the creation of mobile positive hydrogen ions (H+), which resulted in the formation of complexes of salts with molecules of Substance 33. These compounds have much higher ionization potentials than the original molecules of Substance 33, and under those conditions they cannot be ionized, which caused the drop in the detector’s signal.

No one believed me at the time, but I performed experiments with other scientists from the Physical Chemistry Department, and we entirely proved my hypothesis. The fate of this development of the Military Academy of Chemical Defense was solved entirely.

A scientific and technical conference on the problems of the PD ITR of the branch took place in November of 1986 at the Volgograd Scientific Production Association (Khimprom). Representatives of the Novocheboksarsk, Volsk, and Volgograd subsidiaries of GOSNIIOKhT, the Redkino subsidiary of the NPO “Khimavtomatika”, and employees of Ministry of Chemical Industry of the U.S.S.R. took part in the conference. Krasheninnikov, Tkachenko, and Kochetkov, a representative of our Main Administration “Soyuzorgsynthesis” with whom I shared a room at the privileged hotel for the regional committee of the CPSU, were also there.

A few years later, Anatoly Kochetkov became a member of the expert commission that the KGB investigator appointed for investigating my case, and he signed a resolution saying that I was guilty. Since then he has been actively promoted and became a member of the Russia’s Committee for Conventional Problems of the Chemical and Biological Weapons which answers to the President of Russia. However, I am not going to accuse him, because I know how long it took him to slowly scale the job ladder to a high position. He was terrified to lose his position.

The major topic of the conference was the need for the technical re-equipment of the PD ITR service of the branch. It seemed to me that everybody present realized that. Besides, I agreed with the management of Workshop 34, which proposed that my suggestions should be implemented to discover trace quantities of soman and sarin in the emissions of the vented air and wastewater. Good prospects for purchasing more advanced laboratory equipment began to develop. The department already had three Varian chromatographs, and I could order a new Varian 3600 for capillary chromatography and a Finnigan chromatomass-spectrometer produced in the USA. When I was writing the applications, Krasheninnikov advised me, “Write so that the readers will shed tears of sympathy that we have lived without such necessary equipment for so long.” I did my best and soon we were informed that the chemistry section of the Military and Industrial Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. had approved the application.

When I became head of the department, I simultaneously became a member of the Science Council and some of its sections. Additionally, I was made a member of numerous committees, including some which were in the same line of business as the Department for the Security Regime and the First Department.

Despite our strained relations, the Deputy Director in charge of the Department for the Security Regime had to put up with me and, if possible, cooperate. I remember he even invited more than ten people from the KGB to the institute, so that they could listen to my lecture devoted to basics of organizing the PD ITR Department.

I had to give in to the pressure from my colleagues and was elected secretary of the primary departmental party organization. Its members were Communists in my department, in the Department for the Security Regime, in the First Department, and in the Department for Special Communications.

This position took up a lot of my time because the endless meetings of the Party Committee and its subcommittees on different occasions, or without any occasion. This seriously complicated my work, but I found a good way out. I had Svyatoslav Sokolov elected my deputy. He was also appointed my deputy at the PD ITR Department. One of the responsibilities of the secretary was the monthly collection of membership dues. Party members, in turn, had to present information about their salaries, so I learned that the Deputy Director in charge of the Department for the Security Regime was a KGB major and received his salary at the Lubyanka Headquarters of the KGB. I also learned from the personnel files about two other members of my organization. One of them was Ivan Surinsky,[68] a retired lieutenant colonel who was previously the head of a prison camp in Siberia, and another had been the deputy chief in charge of political work at a prison camp in Altai.

All of this put me in a very negative frame of mind. I started to realize that my attempts to receive equipment, space, and people for research work gradually got me involved with a circle of shady, terrible people, whom I had never respected. I am quite an emotional person, and sometimes it is difficult for me to restrain my emotions. I can’t say that rudeness is in my nature, but over the course of time, I often found out that my antipathy became noticeable.

I gradually started thinking about what role I could play, surrounded by these people, the majority of whom could hardly be called decent, and about the role of GOSNIIOKhT and its policies, which were being developed in connection with the CWC negotiations in Geneva.

GOSNIIOKhT took part in this process, by sending its experts to Geneva, but they were selected by only two people – the Director and Martynov. It was a great mystery to me which criteria they used. So, Yuri Skripkin, head of the Analytical Laboratory, and Boris Kuznetsov, head of the Technological Laboratory, became experts.

In 1993 Kuznetsov also became a member of the expert commission that the KGB investigator appointed to consider my case and signed the indictment. Additionally, he spoke on the side of the prosecution in GOSNIIOKhT’s lawsuit against me in the period of January-February of 1994.

But in 1988 Kuznetsov, who was a very narrow-minded person, came running to my office after each trip to Geneva and breathlessly told me about his new work.

On a higher level, Igor Gabov was in charge of further confirmation of the position of the experts from GOSNIIOKhT and Ministry of Chemical Industry on technical aspects for the Geneva negotiations. At that time, Gabov was demoted to a senior engineering position at the Main Administration of “Soyuzorgsynthesis” (The Union of Organic Synthesis), but his friends kept him afloat. A few years later, he was also an expert on my case and argued with enthusiasm that I was guilty of disclosing state secrets.

At that time, the question of how the verification of the CWC would work in the future was a great problem in the negotiations. The majority of the delegations, including the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., supported conducting remote inspections, without visiting the actual plants. So the analysis of emissions of the ventilated air, sewage, and other waste became very important. That is why highly precise and sensitive methods of analysis of chemical compounds played a crucial role. Mainly the emphasis was on looking for organic phosphorus compounds that had a direct chemical bond between carbon and phosphorous atoms (C-P bond). But it wasn’t difficult to circumvent the inspection process. Chemical products with the same bond could be produced for civilian applications at the same facilities producing organophosphorus-based chemical agents. So, units producing phospoliols with the C-P-connection, which were used as metal-extracting agents, started operating at GOSNIIOKhT and its subsidiaries.

Later on, common sense prevailed in Geneva, and the CWC was signed in the beginning of 1993, stipulating on-site inspections as a normal control procedure.[69]^, [70]

However, the development of the more toxic chemical agent A-232, in which the carbon atom is bonded to the phosphorous atom through the oxygen atom (C-O-P bond), considerably complicated the control process. My point is that many agricultural chemicals, which are produced at ordinary chemical plants, have the same bonds.

Many people supposed that it would be a great way to get rid of the old junk, while the new developments would be kept secret and would become the basis for a new round of competition in the field of chemical weapons. Nobody doubted that the U.S. would do exactly the same thing.

I am almost certain that the entire policy and strategy of negotiations in Geneva were developed at UNKhV (Administration of the Commander of the Chemical Troops), and General Anatoly Kuntsevich monitored this process. No one should be misled by the fact that he didn’t take part in the negotiations personally.

The ruse was based on the “dual-use” compounds which were the precursors for ordinary agricultural and other civilian chemicals, but could also be used as precursors for producing chemical agents. When a new chemical agent is being developed, a corresponding civilian preparation is also being developed, for example a pesticide. That is the game.

The development of binary nerve agents will make it unnecessary to organize the dangerous production of chemical agents, as they do for example at the Novocheboksary plant. It makes the problems connected with producing, equipping, storing, and transporting the warheads much easier. The most important point is that any potential violator of the CWC can use some civilian facilities for production, and those factories could be completely unaware that they are producing precursors for lethal binary weapons.

These ideas became really clear to me when I saw the formula of a new pesticide, which was similar to the formula of agent A-232 on a poster, which was hanging on the wall opposite the Directorate. Boris Martynov who was standing nearby boasted that he was “covering his product” in this way. The poster with the formulas of pesticides developed at GOSNIIOKhT and other institutes was meant as a widespread advertisement of the institute’s products. At the same time, the idea was for specialists to “become accustomed” to them as to civilian products.

Quite accidentally, I also soon learned about a strange but significant incident, the meaning of which became clear to me later on.

The typing bureau where secret materials were printed or taped didn’t accept a report prepared by our department on the problems of the PD ITR. The explanation was that the bureau was urgently retyping all technical documentation of the Novocheboksary plant that produced the chemical agent known as Substance 33. It turned out that the report was altered to pretend that they were producing VX gas. This was funny and sad, and I had no idea how they could possibly play the international inspectors for such fools. They were supposed to come to the plant and make sure that a specific chemical agent was being destroyed, not some theoretical agent. Apparently there was something in the strategy of negotiations that allowed them to hope that this trick might work.

At that time I didn’t understand the main idea behind this whole undertaking. Later on when I was released from the KGB’s Lefortovo prison after my first arrest, I called my friend, the late Leonid Lipasov, and he told me about a mistake that I had made in my article “A Poisoned Policy” (Moscow News from September 16, 1992). Only then did I realize how far-sighted the masters of the military-chemical complex had been. In my article I said that General Kuntsevich and others had received the Lenin prize in 1991 for the development of binary weapons based on a new substance. Actually, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, they got the prize for binary weapons based on the well-known Novocheboksary agent Substance 33! The tricky juggling and revision of documents from the Novocheboksary plant was a part of that whole operation.

It would be naive to assume that the generals from the military industrial complex (VPK) did all this just to receive prizes. Everything was done according to a plan that had been elaborated beforehand, a plan that was coordinated with the strategy for conducting negotiations on the framework of the CWC. In the summer of 1995, I met with Amy Smithson a Senior Fellow and now PhD, who was working at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. I was preparing an article for a collection to be published. In my article, I alleged that, according to the Wyoming Memorandum, the parties were supposed to exchange the formulas of their chemical agents, subject to destruction at the second stage of the implementation of this accord. The well known American, Professor Matthew Messelson rebuked me for an inaccuracy. Actually, the parties were supposed to exchange this information three months before signing the CWC, but Russia didn’t come forth with this information.

The main task of the PD ITR Department was made very specific then. It was necessary to keep all new projects a secret. In order to accomplish this, we had to quickly develop more sensitive techniques for the determination of traces quantities of chemical agents in the waste water and air.

In 1989 this work was accelerated because American specialists were soon supposed to visit a number of chemical establishments connected with the development and production of chemical agents. A committee headed by Guskov was formed to prepare for this, and I became a member of this committee.

The necessary techniques were to be developed on an emergency schedule, over the course of about two months. I asserted that it was impossible to develop techniques that were a hundred times more sensitive than the current ones, in such a short period of time. I was puzzled why there should be such a rush before the arrival of specialists, if they were not going to take samples of the water and air. With quite a serious air, Guskov explained that when the foreign specialists came into the room they could take a “swab” from the surface of the wall or floor with their handkerchiefs and then “decipher” the new compounds at home. I made an effort not to burst out laughing. That was how our heads imaged the work of foreign technical intelligence! Science couldn’t and still can’t disclose secrets in such a fantastic way.

According to the “wise” plan of our bosses, all imported equipment had to be removed from the rooms where the Americans were supposed to visit. But that was all that could be done to prepare for the meeting.

Additionally, Guskov explained that Americans were also supposed to visit Workshop 34 of the Volgograd scientific industrial company “Khimprom” that had produced soman and sarin before 1987. I didn’t understand why I had to take care that there was no agent A-230 in the air around this workshop. The deputy director said that behind the fence of Workshop 34 there was a unit of the experimental plant of the Volgograd subsidiary of GOSNIIOKhT, which produced this chemical agent…